The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology issued a new report laying out how the feds can support cities using IT to get smarter.

“In a letter to the president laying out the report’s findings, council co-chairmen John Holdren and Eric Lander stressed that these recommended investments and programs are essential to helping the country keep pace with the rest of the world in the contest to make cities that can best house, transport and entertain the booming numbers of urban dwellers.

““Transforming cities around the world in this way is already a race ― one that the United States cannot afford to lose,” the pair (Holdren and Lander) wrote. “The time is ripe for an integrated approach to innovation to be brought to bear to improve the quality of life for all who live in cities, but perhaps above all the economically disadvantaged and under-connected.””

In a recent article Randall Stephenson (CEO of AT&T) told the New York Times “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.” (see article here).

Technology is changing at a rate to make anyone’s head spin. The need to remain relevant in a changing world is nothing new, but the need to retool is becoming more important than ever. Competition is fierce, new artificial intelligence and machine learning is rendering the need for many human workers obsolete. AT&T’s clear message to its employees is to keep learning.

Luckily, there are many avenues online that make learning inexpensive and easy online from your computer. I recently took two courses one Technicity from Coursera (taught by University of Ohio professors) and one from Future Learn out of the UK. The information in both those courses is current and presented in different ways to suit all learning styles. With accessibility to information becoming more ubiquitous one is really only limited by desire to learn.